Costume Designers Log – May 20th, Saturday, 2017

This is a shirt which has been traced around on Hessian and cut out. The hessian is waiting to be sewn onto the shirt.

As mentioned in the previous post, one of the ideas I was thinking of to create the costumes and stop them from being almost transparent was to purchase clothing that would go on underneath the hessian material. I decided this would be the easiest process even if it is the least cost effective method. My reasoning behind this is because it not only already gets me my measurements for different costumes and gives me a base to be working from, it also stops the light from rendering the hessian see-through and makes it more comfortable for the performers as the hessian is a fairly rough material and can cause irritation against bare skin.

The sewing machine sped up productivity and made making things such as the shirts, a lot easier.

As the sewing process was taking longer than anticipated and my limited skills when it comes to hand-sewing were restricting the speed and efficiency of creating the costumes, I decided it would be best to acquire a sewing machine to help me speed up the process of attaching the hessian to the clothing. Despite some setbacks (including a faulty machine for a short period of time), the sewing machine proved to be a useful and worthwhile investment as, for some elements of the costumes such as the shirts, this was extremely useful as it sped up the sewing process considerably and allowed me to focus my time on the bottoms.

For the bottoms, the majority of clothing I picked was baggy cheap jeans for the men and leggings for the women (with the exception of Kerrie who needed shorts to be able to take them on and off for the dress that her ‘Woman’ character was wearing). The jeans proved initially problematic – the dense material that jeans are made from meant that sewing through them was difficult and often ineffective – so upon further consideration I decided the best way to deal with the jeans was to upcycle scraps of hessian that wouldn’t be used for anything else and cut them into patches which could then be glued onto the clothing. This created an interesting aesthetic, making them look bulky and more distressed than the other clothing.

This is what Jake Skelton’s trousers looked like after being hessian-ed, painted and distressed

For the women, my initial ideas proved hard to realise. I was informed by Becka, the assistant costume maker, that the women’s clothing I had purchased to be the under layer was made of more elastic material than the men’s clothing, and that sewing onto them made it impossible for the women to wear the costumes as they were too restrictive due to the un-elastic nature of hessian material. To overcome this, I have planned to ask the group whether they want skirts or trousers for their costume, and alter my designs.